Colour Schemes

A socialite (Thandie Newton) is pulled from a car wreck by an officer (Matt Dillon) in Crash. Photo Lorey Sebastian. Courtesy Lions Gate Entertainment.

The film Crash presumes that a thin, easily punctured membrane of tolerance protects Los Angeles from its worst self. A Hispanic cop uncorks a torrent of vitriol at an Asian driver. An Iranian-born storeowner accuses a Latino locksmith of scamming him. A white woman grabs her husband’s arm in fear when two young black men approach on a crowded street. The black men complain to one another about her racist gesture, and then hijack whitey’s car.

Crash is tiring. Directed and co-written with well-intended ambition by Canadian-born Paul Haggis, screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby, the film knits together several L.A. stories; imagine a humourless Magnolia. It is a movie of lists — lists of stars and racial epithets and disasters. Sandra Bullock plays the angry wife of an aspiring politico (Brendan Fraser) who is mean to their Mexican-American maid. Matt Dillon is an angry cop who is mean to the black bureaucrat (Loretta Devine) mishandling his dying father’s care. Thandie Newton is an angry upper-class wife whom the angry cop harasses for being black; she, in turn, meanly and angrily accuses her black husband (Terrence Howard) of being an Uncle Tom.

While its air of self-importance and the sheer number of tragedies that befall the characters will probably place Crash beyond critical reproach, it is actually a rather silly film. Another list: After the white cop-black woman molestation, the anti-Arab vandalism, the near-shooting of a dark-skinned five-year-old girl — can there be more? Yes! There is always more pain! — a van appears, and it is filled with Cambodians who are about to be sold as slaves. Rarely have I laughed so hard at human trafficking.

But I fear I laugh alone. Liberal white audiences will tiptoe around Crash, feeling that it is somehow necessary or just to be reminded of their own moral shortcomings and culpability. The right might see the film as vindication of a different yet equally disturbing type: See? They’re as scared of us as we are of them!

Crash wants to be good. It wants to make an oh-so-serious contribution to the debate surrounding race in America, and that’s fine. (Up here, we have our own massive, multicoloured elephant in the room, but this is an American film, so let’s talk about their problems, which aren’t so different from ours, really.) And yet, for all its high-mindedness and melodrama, in the end, Crash delivers a Sesame Street message: we are all the same. And we are all assholes (except for the deified Latino locksmith and his angelic daughter).

Which brings me to Ashton Kutcher. Guess Who, his largely panned release from last month, has less impressive credentials and lower aspirations than Crash. Instead, it has Kutcher, television’s latest crossover doofus. But I would argue that the tepid, slapsticky remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) and produced by Kutcher, is a more revealing investigation of contemporary race relations in America than the pretentious Crash. In fact, Guess Who improves on the original 1967 film’s earnest, dubious politics, in which everyone’s happiness hinges on the white patriarch’s acceptance of his daughter’s black boyfriend, played with impossible virtue by Sidney Poitier in an era when black characters in liberal movies weren’t permitted to be flawed.

Race track: Bernie Mac (left) and Ashton Kutcher in Guess Who. Photo Claudette Barius. Courtesy Columbia Pictures/Regency Enterprises.

The inverted Guess Who casts Bernie Mac and Judith Scott as Percy and Marilyn Jones, upper-middle-class black parents of a daughter who brings home a white boyfriend named Simon (Kutcher). It’s not a very good movie, unforgivably flogging stale jokes, like when father and potential son-in-law go for a drive and the car radio plays several songs in the vein of Ebony and Ivory and Walk on the Wild Side, a scene as funny as the new Pope.

The film is smarter on the relationship level. Simon irks Percy Jones, alpha male father, and it’s not just his Kutcher-ness, nor is it even as simple as his skin. It’s something Percy can’t quite articulate beyond “I don’t trust him.”

Percy’s mistrust turns out to be, in part, anxiety that a mixed-race relationship will create problems for his beloved daughter. His confusion — some murky mixture of his own anti-white feelings, a sense of losing his child and fear for her in the world — is a more interesting reaction than screaming “Cracker in the house!” at the top of his lungs, as Percy would if he suddenly found himself in Crash. Guess Who links racism to love, where Crash links racism almost exclusively to anger. The former makes for a far more interesting narrative, even if it is a movie with copious panty jokes.

In Crash, racial confrontations are triggered by moments of urban crisis like a car accident or an act of violence. The extremity of these incidents has a leveling effect, making all experiences of racism the same. But racism isn’t universal in character; it’s driven by our very personal wins, losses and histories. I can only presume that a black man’s feelings about having a white son-in-law suddenly assuming a seat of power in his home would be different from a white man’s feelings about entering a black man’s family.

It’s not that Crash isn’t right, it’s that it’s right about only one thing, over and over: we’re afraid of each other. That racism is rooted in fear of the unknown is an elementary truth, the kind of limited observation made by Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner almost 40 years ago. Fear is the jumping-off point for the new version, too, but Guess Who — and God help me for saying this about a movie that climaxes with a go-cart race — has a wiser, more contemporary outlook. Simon was raised by a single mom, while his girlfriend grew up in a home rivaling Dallas’s Southfork; in Crash, it is skin, and almost never class, that sets off the multitude of emotional explosions. But Guess Who knows that fear isn’t one-dimensional. It doesn’t simply simmer, waiting for a justification to boil over; most of us are in constant negotiation with our fear. We work against it, or with it, every day, like Simon and his girlfriend tentatively stepping into the world together.

A family dinner in Guess Who: left to right, Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana and Hal Williams. Photo Claudette Barius. Courtesy Columbia Pictures/Regency Enterprises.

Guess Who has one great scene — repeat: one — about exactly this kind of familiar, quiet discomfort. Over dinner with his girlfriend’s family, Simon is goaded into telling a string of black jokes. We wait nervously for the inevitable offence. At first, the family cracks up; the jokes are fairly gentle, and they offer the listeners a chance to peek inside white culture, to see those unknown perceptions and undo them. Then Simon makes a joke that goes too far — interestingly, about black men being unemployed — and nobody laughs. Of course, the scene falls apart. Grandpa goes wingy and the verbal equivalent of a food fight ensues.

The small ways in which we offend or hurt one another, those lead-footed dances we do along each other’s most sensitive zones, shape how we live together. When, in Crash, white racist Matt Dillon pulls black socialite Thandie Newton from a fiery wreck and they have a mutual reckoning, their shared humanity is exceptional, and fleeting. It does not feel rooted in the real world, however, where racism matters.

Perhaps Guess Who succeeds where Crash fails because laughing across colour lines just feels better than being hectored and shoved towards enlightenment. The best modern film on race in America arguably remains Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a movie that balances both comedy and drama, defusing stereotypes and setting off political bombs. Recent successful comedies about the non-white experience, like Barbershop and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, bring audiences into new worlds, showing that measuring difference is not the most important thing in the lives of people of colour. Why, then, is it the most important thing to Paul Haggis? I would hate to think that a white person couldn’t make an astute film about race. Wait — somebody did, and his name is Ashton Kutcher. Someone round up the flying pigs.

Crash opens across Canada on May 6. Guess Who is in theatres.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.